Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Tullaghan Holy Well

I call to the eye of the mind
A well long choked up and dry

And boughs long stripped by the wind

Yeats

Beside the chipped statue of St Christopher
I offered
a bunch of keys to obsolete cars
waiting vainly in unlit parking lots

for their hour to come again.
Farry

Two extracts from works based on (I hate that phrase inspired by!) the holy well on the summit of Tullaghan Hill near Coolaney, Co Sligo, Yeats' play At the Hawk's Well and a poem from my chapbook The Hawk's Rock which accompanied Conor Gallagher's exhibition of the same name last summer.

I mention this because I had an email some time ago from the creator of a website called Voices from the Dawn on the folklore of Ireland's ancient monuments. It seems a well designed website with some very good content, far better than some of the rubbish on the internet about ancient Irish monuments, ancient Celtic gods, fanciful theories and Tara. This site even has footnotes and references! Well done Howard. The Tullaghan well page, from which the picture above is taken, is here.

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